Tuesday 23 July 2013 00.38 EDT
First published on Tuesday 23 July 2013 00.31 EDT

Kevin Rudd has dug in behind his changes to asylum policy, saying at the opening of the new national intelligence and security headquarters that the reforms would proceed whether they were popular or not.

Rudd opened Asio’s new national headquarters in Canberra on Tuesday morning with the opposition leader, Tony Abbott, and made the case for continued vigilance by intelligence agencies against cyber-espionage, terrorism at home and abroad, and people smuggling.

Refugee advocates have savaged Labor’s new asylum policy and the government is anticipating the policy will be challenged in the courts on the basis that it is inconsistent with Australia’s legal obligations to refugees.

Rudd shrugged off the criticism and declared the government would continue to invest “the resources necessary for the purposes of our border security, and take the hard decisions that are necessary in the national interest, whether they are popular or not”.

The adequacy or otherwise of the security of the new Asio headquarters became a matter of political controversy earlier this year after a Four Corners report alleged the building had been the subject of a cyber attack by Chinese hackers.

The ABC report led to a political debate about the adequacy of funding for Australia’s intelligence agencies after Labor backbencher Anthony Byrne – the chairman of parliament’s multipartisan intelligence committee – said cuts were compromising the capability of agencies. Byrne described these circumstances as “completely unacceptable”.

That security debate also became tangled up in the partisan fight over the management of asylum seekers, with the Coalition declaring intelligence agencies were being swamped by boat arrivals. The opposition raised concerns about the adequacy of security checks when there were large numbers of unauthorised arrivals by boat.

Abbott struck a strongly bipartisan tone at the Asio opening ceremony. He said Australia had “real enemies”, and its intelligence community did an exemplary job of keeping Australians safe.

“We only sleep well in our beds at night because of rough men on our borders and because of smart men and women huddled over computer screens in buildings such as this,” Abbott said.

He also remarked that it was apt that the new Asio headquarters was named after Ben Chifley, the Labor prime minister who wrote the charter for Asio. “Ben Chifley,” Abbott remarked, “was Australia’s everyman prime minister.”

Abbott cited a recent observation from the Labor treasurer, Chris Bowen, that Chifley these days could have been a Liberal, or a Green. Abbott begged to differ, saying: “I doubt that very much. Ben Chifley was far too sensible for that.”